Hurt and Comfort
by LazyChild
Summary: After the break-up of Austria and Hungary, Hungary got stuck on the Soviet-side of the Iron Curtain, and just who else might be there I wonder... (PruHun with Slight AusHun)


For a time, all they have to share is hatred.

He's only just begun to remember how to feel pain when she comes to him in 1949, dazed and staggering, still reeling from Budapest and the thousand smaller horrors that followed; are following. He can't rise to meet her challenge as he once could (can't even lift his head without the world spinning around him), so he stays curled on his side in a broken heap on the floor and braces himself for the blow. It never comes. Her land, resources, and morale have all been stripped, and with them her monster strength. Just standing is difficult enough for her now.

But somewhere deep within her _something_ remains, something defiant and burning and furious, so she towers over him and sways on her feet and _screams_ at him. Screams that she hates him, that _he_ deserves to feel the pain she now does, that they have _lost_ and now she's being torn apart and it is _his fault_ and can't he understand that this is killing her?

As she goes on, she switches freely between languages, dipping in and out of her strange barbaric native tongue as though desperate to throw even the untranslatable insults his way. Once or twice, he swears he hears a Russian phrase or two. But he lacks the energy to comment on it, just as he lacks the energy to remind her that yes, yes he _can_ understand, and this was not his choice and it pains him too and can't she just shut up for two fucking seconds and let him _think?_ So he curls in on himself more tightly and tastes his own blood on his tongue and waits for her half-broken voice to fade along with his consciousness.

A few years later, it's his turn to yell. He watches her, crouched and trembling on the ground, blindly groping at the ruins even as the stirred-up ash chokes her again, and feels contempt well up inside him.

What did she think it would accomplish, he demands, standing before her in the same spot where he knows someone else stood, triumphant and terrible, just moments before. How did she _think_he would react? Trying to leave had been stupid enough; taking the tanks had been a death wish. She's accomplished _nothing_, he spits, short of adding a few more bodies to the pile and a notch or two to _his_ growing tally of wins. For them, there is no way out. He knows this. He knew it in '53, when he was struck down as soon as he thought to rise; now he only sees it more clearly. Their names are signed, black ink on paper, and nothing they do will change that unless _he_ decides to change the game, which he won't. It's pointless; it's better to accept that now and move on, and she should _know_ this.

So when she finally gathers her strength and glowers up at him, that spirit of resistance and contempt still in her eyes even as they brim with tears, it takes all his self-control to stop himself from kicking out the rest of her teeth.

In 1961, he does not turn around when he hears her approach. Her footsteps are soft, hesitant even, and he can't begin to imagine what her face must look like (can't bring himself to even try looking), so he keeps his back to her and watches the construction.

He's not sure when it started. First there had been doubt, confusion. Then came the denial, the repeated reassurances, the outright lies, and then a little whispered decision _here_ and just the teeniest bit of barbed wire _here_, and now suddenly the concrete slabs tower before him and he can't for the life of him remember whose idea it was anymore.

Honestly, he's not sure which would be better.

But thinking about it too much would probably be a bad idea, so he sets his jaw and clenches his hands into fists in his jacket pockets and silently wills her to keep her mouth shut. Mercifully, she does.

They're setting up minefields now. He'd laugh, if he still knew how.

It is very hard, however, to completely sever ties, he reflects as he fiddles impatiently with the television antennae. He's not yet cut himself off far enough to block all transmissions from..._over there_ (except in Dresden, poor stupid clueless Dresden), so he watches in when he can and catches glimpses of life on the other side. It's practically spying, he tells himself, _top-secret espionage_, and sometimes he can almost believe it.

Finally, the news. Fascinating how different the same stories can sound when told by separate narrators. He's not surprised when she slips in through the window; if anything, it's one of her more subtle entrances. Instead, he wordlessly slides over and makes room for her on the couch. After the slightest hesitation, she accepts the offer, tucking her legs under her off to the side and leaning away from him on the armrest. They watch the report in civil silence, each listening specifically for news of someone else and neither bothering to call the other out on it. Later, she exits through the window again without a parting word. Again, he's not surprised.

He _is_ surprised when she invites him to visit, and even more so when he arrives and actually sees the place. Somehow, something has changed here; she breathes just a little more freely, speaks just a little more lightly. Once or twice, she even smiles. Not like she used to, never as brilliantly as that (had she been brilliant?), but it's a far cry from her sorry state just a few years before. He is at once happy for and envious of her, and as they walk together through a land that is not quite hers, he gazes out over the crop fields and thinks of battles long past, the clash of steel on steel, and wonders just when who they were became who they are.

Some nights he taunts her, unable to bite back his sick resentment any longer. How pathetic, he sneers, just a stupid little fence between them and she's still so fucking brokenhearted about it. It's nothing, just some twisted wire in a field, but that was all it took. Maybe _he_ just doesn't care enough to go through it for her. Maybe he never did. And she snarls and pins him under her on the bed and doesn't release him until she's sure she's left a mark. Sometimes several.

Some nights she turns right around and does the same to him. A fence is easier to overcome, she teases against his skin, aiming to wound. A fence can be seen through. But he's got so much more than a fence, doesn't he, and only so many ways of knowing what goes on beyond that divide, and over there life is better, _his_ life is _so_ much better without him, maybe there really is no need at all for him anymore-And he grabs her just a bit more roughly than he should those nights, mostly to prove that he still can.

Some nights she cries, and then he doesn't know _what_ to do, so he lies next to her and listens to her pouring her grief and anxiety out into the darkened room, marveling that one heart can hold so much and not crumble under the strain. When she has a lot to say the words bleed into each other, a confused mix made even stranger by her lapses into Hungarian (such a complex language, he thinks, why oh why had he not tried harder to learn it?), but other times her thoughts come slowly, as though from a long way away, and the silence between them is deafening.

Tonight is one of those nights. She's on her back, staring at the ceiling, hands clasped on her bare stomach. One of his hands rests on hers, thumb inexpertly soothing the skin of her knuckles in halting circular patterns. The other arm is trapped uncomfortably under the back of her neck, but he lets her keep it for now, at least until her breathing slows to normal and the awful trembling stops. Every half-suppressed quake of her shoulders reverberates through him like an aftershock.

It's just a fence, she whispers for the fourth (fifth?) time that evening, battling to keep the words even. It's just a fence, he's right, and how could it possibly be so hard to get around such a tiny, insignificant thing as that? But he has no answer for her.

Instead he carefully shifts his pinned arm a bit (even as the blood flow is cut off completely and the pins and needles set in) and idly twirls a section of her hair in his hand. The long strands tangle in his fingers, illuminated oddly by the soft moonlight filtering in through the window. Her hair is damaged, too.

Even now, he's not sure why he wishes so badly that he could offer her some words of comfort. It's so unlike him to offer them, so unlike _her_ to need them. How, when did this happen? When-? But it doesn't matter. It happened, and somehow they missed when it overtook them. Somehow he stopped fighting and didn't realize it, didn't notice how the slogans and plans became his own, how oppression became simply an imposition. Elsewhere, in the frozen seat of his new empire, _he_ must be so proud of it all.

He lets go of her hair and pulls her to him in one swift movement, burying his face in her collar as she wraps her own arms tightly around him. It's just a fence, he thinks to himself, feeling fingernails dig into his back, and they both know that it is so, so much more than that.


End file.
